Wednesday, 10 June 2009

Word for Word

I thought it might be fun to collect some of the comments that the Some Grey Bloke videos inspire. This one's from one of the BNP videos, ripped out of context from a discussion of why racism is perfectly acceptable.

16 comments:

If we accept that the word 'Racism' is legitimate (however defined), then surely we must accept that there are also at least two other legitimate words that describe our attitudes to other life: 'Speciesism' and 'Familyism'. Both these words do come up in a Google search, although definitions vary widely.

(1). Familyism.

We all (at least to some extent) put our immediate family's needs before those of other people, even those of our own race. If my daughter had a life threatening illness, and needed an operation which was not available on the NHS, I would sell everything I had (my house, my car, even perhaps one of my own kidneys) to raise the money for the operation. However when I see the plight of an unrelated little girl in the same situation on the TV news, I may send £10 to an appeal, but I would not sell my home. This does not mean I think the little girl on the TV is inferior to my own daughter, it simply means my own daughter is more important to me (i.e. evolutionary forces at work).

(2). Racism.I prefer the company of my own people (i.e. those I have a close genetic and tribal bond to), we all share ancestors some down the line. I may share a link with an African man 150,000 years ago, but I also share a link (admittedly a more distant one) with my cat. Separation of the human races is just the prelude to us becoming distinctly different species (the human races have already started to develop different illnesses eg. Cykel-cell anaemia). I do not hate other races, I just have an evolutionary drive to support my own. However this is kept in check by my reason (humanity if you wish, although I loath the phrase) which says I should not harm other people simple because they are of a different race [1].

(3). Speciesism.This one is my own pet hate. We all abhor slavery, 'all men are brother' is our cry (slightly familyist what?). But we don’t turn a hair when we see horses with saddles on carrying their riders. But if a negro is my bother, then a horse is my cousin (both ideas I accept to be true). PrehistoryPinup's idea that it's right to concrete over large areas of country side, in-order to build houses for immigrants, ignores the fact that that land already has homes on it. Not human homes, but those of: Foxes, Badgers, Blackbirds, Field Mice etc.

If the argument for doing this is based on our shared heritage with these immigrants, then it falls flat because we also share a heritage with all the current occupiers of the land, don’t we? If it’s a case of how close that link is, then we should put the needs of Eastern European immigrants before those from Africa. And if it's based on intelligence, then we need to stop helping mentally disabled people and spend the money on university students.

Conclusions:Familyism, Racism, and Speciesism, are all a natural result of evolutionary drive to advance our own gene pool. Recognise this and we can come to terms with it, even using the knowledge to help preserve and increase the diversity of life on this planet. Reject it and we will have 9 million humans by 2050 and a totally lifeless earth by 2150. Mankind controls the number of other species when they start to become a problem (normally a problem only to us by the way) that's speciesism. Should we not extend that to a more racist policy and accept that: 'The human races, in excessive numbers, are just another form of pollution'.

Can anyone deny that most intelligent life on earth would be better off if the human races didn't exist.

You said:"In Collett's cockroach case it was just a throw away comment and should have been treated with contempt and forgotten."

But I think it was at the end of that speech that somebody very clearly shouts "let's kill some Pakis!". You claim Collet's not representative of the BNP, but his words certainly seemed to stir up those present.

I say:Not everyone in that meeting was a BNP members (in fact most won't have been). Also it was being filmed by the BBC who to my certain knowledge (because I was a BNP member in Bradford at the time) used infiltrators to build up their story. The shout could well have come from Andrew Sykes a Searchlight plant working with the BBC. But of course I can't prove that. But he was at that meeting.

I don't intend to defend Mark Collett, nor his style of address, only his right to free speech. Which in my view should only stop at direct incitement to violence. And I do mean direct, ie Go beat up Mr Jones or group X, not: 'everyone should hate Mr Jones or group X'. But I'm open to a reasonable argument over where the limits of free speech should be.

Mark Collett is not the BNP. But I have long suspected that he may be a searchlight mole, or more likely he's just taking payments from them for specific actions. While I was in Bradford, Collett and Sykes were very good friends, and Searchlight does have lots of money to throw around.

Likewise; but I don't define "my own people" as people I happen to share genes with. I have the ability to choose whose company I want to keep, based on how they think and behave. Being rational, thinking beings means that we (or at least, many of us) no longer have to be slaves to ancient tribal instincts.

You and I and Collett are the same colour, and yet I feel no kinship with you. And if your party ever achieved power - which it won't - you'd seek to prohibit my relationships with people I do love and respect.

That's a total distortion of what I said. As for our party achieving power, unless you have been asleep for the last 72 hours, you will have noticed the BNP is now on the 3rd run up the ladder to national government.

(local council, county council, EU superstate) the next step is to get MPs elected. Then to convince enough British voters that we can be trusted to save the nation.

It's a long journey, but we are now well on the road to elected democratic power.

Leaving any constructive response to a posting is simply impossible. Now that may be because it's only intended for short posts about the individual video, and not for a series back and forth comments and responses. But it still sucks!

I actually have a very exotic taste in women. It's a bit ironic that I ended up marrying a typical North European, but it's probably down to statistics -- in North Europe, North Europeans tend to outnumber Asians and Africans, so there was always a good chance I'd finally meet my soulmate among the white population. But I digress.

The thing about Dracopool's argument is that he takes his own personal tastes -- he goes for white women -- and cites them as proof that mixed-race relationships are unnatural. I disagree with that: there's nothing wrong with Dracopool preferring whites, but there's everything wrong with Dracopool suggesting that anyone who doesn't share his personal taste must be stupid, or whatever it is he's suggesting.

Does this mean that all sexual proclivities are defensible? No; clearly, sexual relationships involving abuse (e.g. of children or animals) is not defensible except perhaps a small amount by mutual consent.

Dracopool presumes to speak on behalf of all of us: "...humans... realise that other races are... not good for offspring." Well, this human doesn't realise that, and would need to see some pretty convincing evidence to come around to this way of thinking.

Chris, you seem to be suggesting that because speciation is a natural evolutionary process, we should not try to interfere. But speciation hasn't taken place yet, and the existence of different races doesn't automatically mean it's underway. But evolution isn't some sort of divine force that must not be impeded; it isn't a "force" at all. Evolution is just a consequence of things happening, and what is happening now is that we humans, through the evolution of the right sort of intelligence to allow us to invent things, can move around much more freely making it easier to recombine our genes, making it more likely that the entire human race will advance together instead of branching off into distinct species.

As any dog expert will tell you, pedigree dogs may be very valuable, but often suffer from quite nasty conditions unique to their breeds; while mongrels, far from being inferior, usually suffer fewer problems; and in most people's experience, mongrels tend to be more intelligent.

"Can anyone deny that most intelligent life on earth would be better off if the human races didn't exist."

Funny you should say that, Anti-gag,

Your understanding of evolutionary biology is a decidedly shaky and thoroughly Victorian (In a "I heard the abstract for the Descent of Man but didn't bother reading the book style.)

Race exists only as a social and cultural construct. The notion of it being a scientifically legitimate categorisation has been steadily abandoned since the very beginning of the twentieth century. We've reached a stage where research into human genetics has demonstrated that there is more variation within "races" than between "races", which renders your evolutionary/genetic arguments invalid.

The human races don't exist in any objective sense. All living human beings belong to the same subspecies of the same species - we are all homo sapiens sapiens - and the superficial variations between people of different (cultural) groups are increasingly (in the absence of any evidence to suggest otherwise) felt to be simple products of sexual, rather than natural selection.

"As for our party achieving power, unless you have been asleep for the last 72 hours, you will have noticed the BNP is now on the 3rd run up the ladder to national government."

The number of votes for the BNP dropped between the last European elections five years ago and this year's. The party were only able to get a member to the European Parliament because the percentage of the vote increased. This is due to a low turn out, and a large number of Labour supporters in particular staying at home. The BNP were also well served by the absence this time around of a postal vote option. I wouldn't get carried away and imagine the BNP will be frog-marching into government. The British people have long rejected political extremism, and demagoguery only works in certain localised areas - which would never be enough to achieve or maintain a popular vote.

You said:'As any dog expert will tell you, pedigree dogs may be very valuable, but often suffer from quite nasty conditions unique to their breeds; while mongrels, far from being inferior, usually suffer fewer problems; and in most people's experience, mongrels tend to be more intelligent.'

I say:Yes a dog breeder may well tell you that and of course they would be right. But they would be talking of a gene pool in the hundreds, at most a few thousands.

The problems of closed breeding show themselves in isolated populations of a few thousand individuals (I'm also talking about the humans now), but not in populations of the order of 10,000's. The British Isles has a indigenous population of around 54m (50m in the UK and 4 in Ireland), in such a large gene pool no inbreeding problems could possible occur.

Although published research on the topic is hard to come-by, suggestions that pregnancies resulting from interracial sexual relationships are slightly lower than in those of same race intercourse. That does not mean such relationships will reduce the population explosion as it would take only a second act of intercourse to more than even up the pregnancy rate. Also there have been reports of studies which show, children of mixed race suffer more health problems than would be expected if no advice affect from such mixing was present. Now I know what you're going to say, and you're correct, I have only seen reports of the studies never the actual report itself. The rumours are that such studies are suppressed, or at the very least played down for politically correct reasons.

As for your contention that mongrels tend to be more intelligent, that may well be true. Rejecting nature to pick out 'desirable traits' (not desirable in my view) such as very flat faces is madness. King Charles Spaniels are now suffering from constricted brain cavities, causing epilepsy etc. Mankind has a lot to answer for.

Just because we are now able to overcome obstacles to separate racial development, does not mean we should. Nor should we reject natural selection just because we can. I like my race and I want to see it thrive (albeit in controlled numbers), I do not want a single homogeneous mongrel human race. I could go on all night but I'm afraid I need to finish some work for a meeting tomorrow (I mean today now) so I'll leave this there for now.

Keep wellChris Hill(Lancaster)

PS.Please forgive any grammatical or spelling mistakes, but I'm afraid just too tired to check this post over tonight. Sorry.

To be sure, the BNP did gain a few votes; tellingly, however, in one region (North West, I believe), the total number of votes for the BNP did drop, which is the statistic which some sloppy journalists have attributed to the BNP as a whole. The fact is that the BNP was still soundly thrashed by UKIP; and comfortably beaten by the Greens, who managed to increase their share of the vote by almost twice the amount the BNP did.

Research into the health of mixed-race children hasn't been supressed, as a quick Google search reveals. Here's one such study:

On first glance, it would seem to support your hypothesis, if you get this far and then stop: "Mixed-race adolescents showed higher risk when compared with single-race adolescents on general health questions, school experience, smoking and drinking, and other risk variables."

However, if you continue, you discover that the authors came to a radically different conclusion from the one you may have drawn: "The findings are compatible with interpreting the elevated risk of mixed race as associated with stress."

In other words, they believe it has nothing to do with having "mongrel genes" or anything: it's to do with being labelled as an outsider due to the fact that they don't "fit in" to any particular group; i.e., it is the attitude of others towards race that is at fault here, not the mixed heritage itself. Note that subjects were asked what race or races they identified with, rather than, say, performing DNA tests to establish racial identity: the authors believe it's all in the mind.

The authors admit they have no way to test this hypothesis.

Here is another interpretation of the same study, which, among other things, makes the point that generally speaking, where people of different races are considered to have lower status -- think of attitudes to race in the American Deep South -- when someone of a higher status marries someone of a lower status, the overall status of the couple, and thus their children, is much lower. That would contribute to the stress factor.

Obviously, this isn't the only possible interpretation. But it's as well to understand that more than one interpretation is possible, and that if an alternative interpretation does adequately explain the results without introducing too many assumptions (the principle of Occam's razor), it's certainly worthy of consideration.

That's OK, Anti-gag, You can leave your response for as long as you please; I won't be reading it in any case, as I don't take my lessons from unqualified people on the Internet who talk of "suppressed research", whatever prismatic worldview they're attempting to furnish with credibility. I'll leave you in peace with your fantasy politics supported by your outdated, fantasy pseudo-science because, happily, your distorted views aren't relevant at this point in history and don't require much direct engagement; it isn't you and your idée fixe [That's French. An example of linguistic impurity!] with whom we need to concern ourselves, but the pockets of people the BNP manages to gull.Your people were beaten back at Cable Street, and if needs be, you'll be beaten back again.